I have  VM running Emby that I set up a while ago on an low spec machine that had been the guest computer before everyone got Chromebooks and tablets. But it only had 2GB of RAM and I gave 1GB to the VM. So I added some new RAM to bring the system up to 8GB and wanted to start off by giving the VM 4GB to see if that improved performance.

I came across this in Target during Christmas time. Now, I am not a fan of the concept of the Elf on the Shelf and I’ve heard quite a few anecdotes of kids becoming freaked out - like the girl who called 911 because it fell and she didn’t want to touch it because kids are told that if they touch it they won’t get any presents. But between companies looking for a cash grab and those Jewish families who want to celebrate not-Christmas (like the ones where I went to high school that had Hanukkah Bushes (Christmas Trees with blue lights) and Hanukkah outside decorations), I guess this was inevitable.

Recently I’ve been having a problem where the Emby server kept dying. I haven’t been able to figure out what is causing it. So while I’ve been trying to figure it out with the Emby folks, I fixed up the systemd script for Emby so that it would restart itself whenever it died. It was incredibly simple to do this. Here’s the original script:

[Unit]
 Description=Emby Media Server
 After=network.target

[Service]
 EnvironmentFile=/etc/emby-server.conf
 ExecStart=/usr/lib/emby-server/emby-server.sh start
 Restart=on-abort
 TimeoutSec=20
 ExecStopPost=/usr/lib/emby-server/emby-server.sh clear

[Install]
 WantedBy=multi-user.target

And here’s how I fixed it:

If you want a full-size version for printing out, email me.

Upgraded the final computer - the server host that has the VM with our Kodi stuff. It was the least complicated upgrade - didn’t have to remove anything - it just worked. And that was a great change, for once. (Not that the others were too much of a pain).

Lots of artists made their spot because I attended a concert or discovered them this year and got very enthusiastic about listening to this new artist. There are also lots of Spotify scrobbles, but not as many as there would be if work’s firewall didn’t keep scrobbles from being counted.

Artists

1. Anberlin (427 listens)
2. Fall Out boy (239 listens)
3. Jim Guthrie (221 listens)
4. I Fight Dragons (214 listens)
5. Paul and Storm (190 listens) - A nerdy folksy group that I really like. Their irreverence is my kind of fun.
6. The Beatles (136 listens)
7. Anamanaguchi (130 listens)
8. Lionize (130 listens)
9. Five Iron Frenzy (128 listens)
10. Louis Jordan (113 listens)
11. The Protomen (104 listens)
12. Beebs and Her Money Makers (104 listens)
13. Willy Chirino (93 listens)
14. Katy Perry (93 listens)
15. Ignacio Cervantes (92 listens)

Songs

Interestingly, only two new songs made the list this year - Talking Body and Know Yourself. Because I don’t listen to the radio, I discovered these via Spotify. The rest are all older songs that I happened to listen to a lot. And Chandelier came from Danielle getting the album and asking me to play it in the car.

This was not a big quarter for listening to music for me. That’s mostly because Sam and Stella were born and so I didn’t have much ability to listen to music as I needed to be able to hear if they were crying or if someone needed help with them. According to last.fm I went from 1,104 scrobbles in Oct to 288 in November.

1. Beebs and Her Money Makers (94 listens) - one of the songs came up randomly in Amarok which led me to listen through the albums a few times.
2. The Beatles (55 listens)
3. Kenny Clarke (44 listens) - A Fresh Air review of a new collection got me interested in him so I added it to my Spotify tracks. Really fun music.
4. Anberlin (34 listens)
5. DJ Cutman (33 listens) - I don’t know why, but I ended up with a lot of DJ Cutman music on my new phone and since I don’t like to use bandwidth while I’m driving, I’ve listened to it a lot in the car.
6. Ignacio Cervantes (32 listens)
7. Fall Out Boy (29 listens)
8. Danny Elfman (28 listens)
9. Katy Perry (26 listens) - all from Scarlett requests
10. Relent K (25 listens)
11. Five Iron Frenzy (24 listens)
12. Jonathan Geer (19 listens)
13. Vampire Weekend (18 listens) - heard a song so I wanted to re-explore the band. Some of the songs still hit me hard and others have faded.
14. Sergei Prokofiev (17 listens)
15. Anamanaguchi 16 listens)

Stats: Total Songs (in my collection): 16985 (Up from 16088 ) – Mostly from buying CDs with 100 tracks of various classical artists.

This year I took ebooks and comics with me when visiting the in-laws and took advantage of having books on my phone to read in idle moments when listening to podcasts wouldn’t make sense - say I needed to be able to hear my name being called. So I was able to read 86 books this year (287% of my Goodreads goal of 30). Although audiobooks mess this stat up, I read 21,160 pages according to Goodreads. Also according to Goodreads my least popular book was Big Pulp: Ted Bundy’s Beetle which was only read by one other person. My most popular book was Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone which was read by nearly 4 million other people.

2015 turned out to be an incredible  year for videos games for me. That’s a good thing because I was playing for the Extra Life charity to raise money for Johns Hopkins. I’d heard about it when the Giant Bomb guys spoke about it, but this year I had a reason - Johns Hopkins had saved Scarlett’s life twice! I’d experimented with recording myself playing video games when Dan started his Let’s Plays and used Camtasia. But there was no way I could justify paying $100 to record myself playing games. Then I discovered OBS which was, in typical FLOSS fashion, impossible to figure out. But then I found XSplit which had recently gone to having a freemium model. Once I learned what all the terminology was in XSplit I was able to go back to OBS - which I did because they actually catered to Linux in addition to Windows. The most fun moments have been when people have stepped into my Twitch or Youtube Gaming channels and chatted during the game. It brings back the social aspect that I grew up with back before everyone had internet.